


Trapped

by yet_intrepid



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 08:33:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/877790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Surely somehow he could build a future, even here? Surely somehow he could deliver himself, if he had to die trying.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Feuilly, at sixteen, has not yet met the amis and is struggling to find meaning in a life of monotony and hardship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trapped

_Why should you spend your whole life living_  
 _Trapped where there ain’t no future, even at seventeen?_  
\- "Santa Fe," _Newsies_

Reading or drawing tonight? Feuilly asked himself as he dragged himself home from the factory. It was reading _or_ drawing, because he had neither energy nor candle to spend on both. And really, he told himself wearily, he ought not to waste the candle and his time to rest on either. He’d been reprimanded at work two days in a row, and if his performance didn’t improve, he could lose the position entirely.

Maybe that would be better.

The thought hit him with unexpected force as he started up the fourth flight of stairs on the way to his flat. Maybe it’d be better if somebody else gets the work, somebody with a family, somebody who needs it and who won’t forever be discontent. As for me, I’ll find something, or—or I won’t, and either way does it matter? If the last thing I do is give my job to someone who needs it more, perhaps that’s as good of an end as I’ll find.

He finished climbing up the stairs and unlocked his door, hands shaking with exhaustion and lips pressed tight. It’d—well, it’d be a decent enough end, he thought. If I can’t get the money and time for books, can’t make any difference to Poland or France, at least I could help a few people. Give what I have, though that’s only a badly-paid, unsafe job with long hours and unfair foremen.

Feuilly dropped onto his bed, hands falling into his lap. He stared at them. They were red and rough from work, and all their lines spelled exhaustion. They were no worse hands than those of a trained artist, but he had to force them to draw even the simplest of things after fourteen hours of labor.

He didn’t know what motivated him—hope or habit, defiance or despair—but he moved to the table, lit his candle, and took up his pencil. He began to draw his hand, the broken nails, the ripped skin and the calluses, the uneven cuticles. He shaded carefully and furiously, trying to capture the redness in graphite. And as he drew, the candle flickered, and he felt anger stopping up his throat.

His eyes closed. His pencil stopped.

He wondered why. Demanded, why?

The hand he was drawing clenched into a fist, and tears built up behind his eyelids. There had to be something more—he had to find something more. Surely somehow he could build a future, even here? Surely somehow he could deliver himself, if he had to die trying. Oh, God, he was sixteen; there was a whole life ahead of him, and that life could be horrifically empty, but he wouldn’t give up on trying to make something of it. He couldn’t. If all he could do was dream and read and draw, he would do that. Even if it made him cry, because those who weep are not dead at least.

He opened his eyes and his tears spilled on the paper.

Maybe he was trapped for life, but his struggle towards deliverance would itself be freeing enough to keep him going.

Feuilly drew late into the night, drew shelves of books, drew clusters of friends enthusiastically discussing, drew tricolor flags flying free.

He drew until his candle flickered out and he was left to make his way to bed in the suffocating darkness.

If he made too many mistakes and got sacked tomorrow, he wondered, would he be more or less trapped than he was now?


End file.
